Anyone who loves books is a patsy for second book sales or swaps and that’s why, whenever I can, I drop by Ibu Susan’s Book Swap at Dijon in Kuta Poleng every last Sunday of each month (normally Sunday, but subject to change) between 2.00 & 4.00 pm. There’s usually something for me among the dross of romance and bodice-rippers, but last month I struck real lucky. Some nameless benefactor out there “liberated” a slim volume from the National Library of Singapore.....Thanks, mate!
It was a short paperback novel called “Flying Hero Class” by Thomas Kenneally, Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. It is a gem of a book and it prompts me to share a bit about it and a couple of other ones about Aboriginal Australia worth reading. Along with one that’s a real dog.
Thomas Kennealy is without question one of Australia’s finest living novelists. He has a lucid and succinct prose style that manages to convey human complexity and at the same time tell a gripping story. A bit like Graham Greene, but the introspection isn’t quite so self-lacerating or depressing. Born in New South Wales in 1935 he has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize and won it for “Schindler’s Ark” in 1982.
The book can best be described as a psychological, or even metaphysical thriller. While most New Age novels are so badly written as to be virtually unreadable this work, despite some of its subject matter, can in no way be described as new agey. The story is straightforward enough. Struggling white Australian writer with marriage and drink problems gets a job as the manager for a small Aboriginal Dance group on a tour of New York and Frankfurt. To everyone’s surprise the Aboriginal dance group make it big in New York and become a huge international success. On the flight from New York to Frankfurt the plane is hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. Scene set, Kenneally goes on to explore the entwined histories of the Western, Aboriginal and Middle Eastern experiences through various protagonists. It is masterfully done and his portrayal of the young Palestinian hi-jackers is credible and revealing, if a bit dated in view of the more philosophically virulent and encompassing Al Qaeda strain of terrorism. But it is what he says about the Aborigine dancers where Kennealy is at his best. He is one of the few Australian writers who appears to have a real depth of understanding of the Aboriginal experience and can convey that in a way that is neither patronising or anthropologic.
Without spoiling the story by revealing too much, behind the political clash between the West and the Islamic world, and the Aboriginal experience at the hands of the white men who came to Australia, lies a much older and far more interesting theme than the present-day clash of tribal nationalisms. What Kenneally reveals is the real power of an ancient native culture and how its civilising message, far from being an interesting archaic phenomenon, actually points the way forward if we have the wit to remember it and incorporate it into our future. Kenneally makes it all sound very simple, but actually this is a very profound small book.
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Mutant Message Down Under” by Marlo Morgan, Harper Collins, 1994. There are some books that are so bad that it is hard to know where to begin. And this is one of them.
Let me start by saying that it took me three attempts and as many years before I could force myself to finish what is not a long book. It is that poorly written. Why did I bother? Well, once or twice a year my wife and I lead small groups of people, many of them Americans, to visit and hang out with the elders in the more inaccessible parts of Australia’s tribal territories. More than a couple of people who travelled with us have asked if I had read this book and what I thought about it? Usually sharing that it was reading this book that had initially inspired them to want to visit Aboriginal Australia. Not having read it and out of respect for their experience I was studiously non-committal, but what I had heard had not been good. Sooner or later I knew I’d have to read it. Now that I have, I’m sorry I did.
Marlo Morgan was a MidWest matron of 50 when she wrote “Mutant Message Down Under”, originally self-publishing it, like “The Celestine Prophecy” (another equally badly written book) and it eventually went on to become a bestseller. Part of the personal hype to promote the book was that it was a true story. By the time the book hit the bigtime it was clear that Ms Morgan was fibbing and had to admit it was a work of fiction.
Anyone who knows even a little about Aboriginal Australia and who has read the book could have told you that. The book has nothing at all with to do with Aboriginal life and culture. It is a mish-mash of New Agey shopping-mall banalities grafted onto the oldest oral tradition that exists on earth. As such it is a laughable travesty. There is not a tribe in Australia that would traipse 1,400 miles across Australia let alone dragging Marlo Morgan around their sacred sites. Aboriginal tribes are not nomadic. They are totally attached and involved as keepers of “their” land. They cannot and would not sing another man’s story.
Ms Morgan was accused by many of betraying Aboriginal trust by revealing things she should not have done. Frankly, I doubt this. It was all either made up or stuff fed her second hand. Marlo Morgan, it seems to me, just invented a fantasy which meant something to her and to quite a lot of other folk. While I don’t think she should have tried to pass it off as true, it does not necessarily invalidate the work. After all, years later Carlos Castaneda was found to have invented Don Juan, but what he wrote is still interesting, or was back then.
No, what is unforgivable is writing a bad and boring book about a fascinating subject and going on to compound the crime by writing another equally bad and exploitative book on Australia’s “missing children”.
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Voices of the First Day”
Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime by Robert Lawlor, Inner Traditions Intl., Rochester. This is a wonderful but flawed book. There are some wonderful century-old photos included. I once came across a serious young German anthropologist working his passage in the bookshop at Uluru, who was practically tearing the book out of the hands of a couple who were trying to buy it. “No, No, it is not right for you. You read this!”, he ordered shoving “Mutant Message Down Under” at them with a scarce-concealed sneer. Thing is, Robert Lawlor’s wide ranging approach can upset the overly academic. But for anyone who wants to get a real introduction to and an understanding of the Aboriginal Dreamtime and the Aboriginal experience I cannot think of a better book for it. “Stick to your guns. Buy it! “ I said to the couple, basking in the young anthropologist’s hostile glare.
Robert Lawlor is an interesting bloke. A New Yorker, he left the US for India in the 60’s and spent some years living at Aurobindoville. In the 70’s he became fascinated with Australian Aboriginal mythology and now lives in Australia on Flinders Island, that sad and haunted island midway between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. He is the author of “Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality” and “Sacred Geometry” .
Lawlor’s research for this book is drawn from the earliest anthropological writings and his personal encounters with the Aborigines. The work gives us an access into the deepest collective memory of humanity, allowing us to contact our origins and awaken us to the Dreaming, which still remains in us all as a vast and dimly remembered reservoir of intuitive talent for our future wellbeing, planetary and individual. Lawlor goes on to place the Dreaming in a cosmogonic context and his polemic in this respect may be a step too far for some.
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Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Cape, 1987 is another book I’m also often asked about. Chatwin is always an interesting writer but his gift is really for finely observed travel. He does not have Kennealy and Lawlor’s ability to give us that sense of the Dreamtime, so fundamental to the Aboriginal experience. The book actually seems to be several books rolled into one. It doesn’t quite hang together. Still, there are some wonderful passages and it’s a great read.
For a more detailed book on the subject A.P. Elkin’s “Aboriginal Men of High Degree: Initiation & Sorcery in the World’s Oldest Tradition”, Inner Traditions, 1977 may be hard work but is as good as it gets.
